Plastic bag ban is misguided, as was attempted plastic bag ban ban | Opinion

A Kansas Senate committee made the right move Thursday when it shot down a proposed law that would have banned local governments from banning plastic shopping bags.

And now it’s time for Wichita to step up and show the same kind of common sense and not ban them.

I know that sounds contradictory, but hear me out.

Plastic bags have their place. We’d be ill-served by an outright ban, as some in Wichita are pushing for, while we’d be equally ill-served by the totally hands-off approach contemplated in the late Senate Bill 47.

We need a more nuanced approach.

Nobody could seriously argue that used bags blowing around is not an annoyance at the least and an environmental nightmare at its worst — except possibly the Kansas Chamber of Commerce, the driving force behind SB47.

On my 10-mile drive to work this morning, I counted 16 free-range plastic bags; in trees, blown up against fences, in puddles in the gutter and under the Kellogg freeway overpass. And like any good citizen, it makes me angry to see that.

But we can’t let that anger overrule our better judgment. An outright ban on bags would be serious overkill — kind of like using a nuclear missile to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon.

It might address the immediate problem, but create other, potentially larger problems downstream.

The city of Wichita is, right now, conducting a survey on its Facebook page on what they call single-use plastic bags.

But “single use” is a misnomer.

I — and practically everyone else I know — bring groceries home in the free bags from the store and then take out the trash in those same bags.

Take away the take-home bags and you’ll see a corresponding increase in purchases of trash bags that contain more plastic per bag.

Researchers at the University of Georgia took a look at California and found that when take-home bags were banned, sales of four-gallon trash bags increased 55% to 75%, while sales of eight-gallon trash bags increased 87% to 110%.

At lower-volume stores, additional sales of four-gallon bags added 30 to 135 pounds of plastic waste per store per month. The sales of eight-gallon trash bags created an additional 37 to 224 pounds. That script only flipped at big stores that generate at least 326 carryout bags a day.

I can only remember ever once releasing a plastic bag into the wild.

I’d bought some parts at the auto store and while I was lying underneath the car installing said parts, a Kansas dust devil blew through and picked up the bag the parts came in. By the time I got out from under the car, it was gone baby gone to I don’t know where, probably Pratt.

I felt bad about that then and I actually kind of still do.

But to continue the auto analogy, if I buy five quarts of motor oil, a bottle of brake fluid and a can of parts dip, yeah, I want a bag to carry it in. If I buy a water pump, just hand me the box. I don’t need a bag. It’s redundant.

But it seems like whatever you buy, the universal cashier default is to automatically put it in a plastic bag.

Not long ago, I bought a memory microchip for my phone. The tiny chip came blister-packed on a card containing at least 100 times as much plastic as the mass of the chip itself. At checkout, the cashier put it in a plastic bag.

If you go to the grocery store, a pound of hamburger goes into one bag, canned goods into another, paper goods into a third, etc. etc.

Maybe the city could reach out to the stores and ask them to pack a little tighter to reduce the number of bags. For single items like a package of toilet paper, don’t bag it at all unless the customer asks.

The stores could put messages on the screens in their self-checkout lanes, asking shoppers to please minimize bag use. I think most people would do that, if they were reminded at the point of sale.

It’s at least worth a try, before we hop on the next bus to Bansville.